Audition-related Episodes

396: Orin O’Brien on Leonard Bernstein, Fred Zimmerman, and life in the New York Philharmonic

Orin O’Brien
credit: Henry Grossman

It is an honor and a pleasure to welcome Orin O’Brien to the show! I’ve been hoping to have Orin as a guest for years, and I want to give a big shout-out to Chris Mathers for connecting the two of us!

We chat about numerous shared acquaintances, including Greg Sarchet, Miloslov Gajdos, David Grossman, Ira Gold, Ed Barker, Hal Robinson, Max Dimoff, Michael Hovnanian, Douglas Mapp, and Ron Wasserman.

More About Orin

New York Philharmonic bassist Orin O’Brien was born in Hollywood to parents in the film industry, George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, and received her early musical training in Los Angeles, where she studied with Milton Kestenbaum and Herman Reinshagen. She then studied in New York with Frederick Zimmermann and graduated from The Juilliard School, and is an alumna of the Music Academy of the West, now a partner in the New York Philharmonic Global Academy.

383: The Orchestral Dream is Dead with Matt Waters

Earlier this summer, I read an article from Matthew Waters that caught my attention. Titled The Orchestral Dream is Dead, it outlined Matt’s experiences going through school at UCLA and trying to develop a career in Los Angeles.

I posted this article on Facebook, and it got a lot of thoughtful comments from orchestral musicians, students, and others. I thought that it would be great to chat with Matt for the podcast and dig into these topics.

358: Orchestra and Opera Excerpts

This is a “best of” episode from three classic Contrabass Conversations episodes. Back in the early days of the podcast, John Grillo and I recorded two episodes that dissected various excerpts. He and I talked through each excerpt and then played a recording of John performing it.

These have been extremely popular resources over the years, but they came out not he podcast ten years ago. With so many episodes of this podcast and so many new listeners to the show, bringing these classic offerings to light is important to me, so I’m planning on doing a few rebroadcasts of this cornerstone content every now and again.